and here’s ron paul at the cato institute talking about what’s at stake with a fed audit…mainly that we’ve financed all our wars and welfare statism via unlimited money creation…and dollar might collapse once we look behind the curtain at the fed….

(start at 4 minutes as this 60 seconds is most important..p.s. need a .flv video editor)

How did we get into this mess in the first place? As in the 1920s, the current “disturbance” started with a “mania.” But manias always have a cause. “If you investigate individually the manias that the market has so dubbed over the years, in every case, it was expansive monetary policy that generated the boom in an asset.

“The particular asset varied from one boom to another. But the basic underlying propagator was too-easy monetary policy and too-low interest rates that induced ordinary people to say, well, it’s so cheap to acquire whatever is the object of desire in an asset boom, and go ahead and acquire that object. And then of course if monetary policy tightens, the boom collapses.”

The house-price boom began with the very low interest rates in the early years of this decade under former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.”

here’s ron paul (once again proven right by this current crisis) breaking down how the fed causes bubbles like our current housing bubble. side note: us govt stopped tracking money supply in 2006.

great graphs of how the american banking industry was slaughtered this year. $1 trillion lost, which roughly equal to the amount of new money printed by the govemment over last few years. to me this is a scary relationship – print tons of money, which then gets lost on stupid loans? waaay easier to lend money when you have a feeling you won’t have to pay it back….